sanctification on Cultivation

The seed of God is in us. Given an intelligent and hard-working farmer, it will thrive and grow up to God, whose seed it is; and accordingly its fruits will be God-nature. Pear seeds grow into pear tr...

Christian character is not an act but a process, not a sudden creation but a development. It grows and bears fruit like a tree; it requires patient care and unwearied cultivation.

Spiritual nourishment cannot be seen purely in our outward behavior. The process of sanctification is a deeply internal process. Outside growth is merely a symptom, and acting better does not mean our...

Any experienced gardener has heard of a botanical term called Apical (ah-pick-ul) dominance. In most plants that grow from a central stem, from maple trees to bush peas, whatever branch is at the top ...

Sanctification is a community project.

Sanctification costs to the extent of "an intense narrowing of all our interests on earth and an immense broadening of all our interests in God.

A lack of nutrition in early life can result in stunted growth. Stunting results in lifelong health complications. According to the WHO: Stunting in early life -- particularly in the first 1000 days...

A couple years ago I got to take a tour of the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. The name is a bit misleading because what they are most known for are there amazing gardens. And so we were o...

[Sanctification] is a process that includes on the one hand medication and diet (in the form of biblical instruction and admonition coming in various ways to the heart), and on the other hand tests an...

Everything we say or do will either illuminate or obscure the character of God. Sanctification is the process of joyfully growing luminous.

My father was an artist. He had a black leather sketchbook filled with cartoons and doodles. As a boy I was enthralled by his drawings and wondered how I could learn to draw like him. I began by traci...

In this excerpt from a sermon on the Lord’s Supper delivered by Augustine of Hippo to a group of Catechumens, (a Christian believer preparing for Baptism) the great bishop compares the process in whic...

In the early 1800s, the German naturalist and explorer Baron Alexander von Humboldt journeyed through South America on a scientific expedition. Deep in the Amazon rainforest, he encountered Indigenous...

"Everything we encounter today is used by God to prepare us for tomorrow. he wastes no trials, withholds no blessings, nor does he hold back on the discipline of his soldiers. All He does prepare...

Sanctification is not by surrender, but by divinely enabled toil and effort.

We should neither court suffering nor complain about it. Instead, we should see it as one of the means God chooses to employ in order to make us increasingly useful to our Master.

The Christian life requires hard work. Our sanctification is a process wherein we are coworkers with God. We have the promise of God's assistance in our labor, but His divine help does not annul o...

There was once a sculptor who worked hard with hammer and chisel on a large block of marble. A little child who was watching him saw nothing more than large and small pieces of stone falling away left...

Sanctification grows out of faith in Jesus Christ. Remember holiness is a flower, not a root; it is not sanctification that saves, but salvation that sanctifies.

“It would be nice and fairly nearly true, to say that ‘from that time forth, Eustace was a different boy.’ To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still ma...

Sanctification is not a work of nature, but a work of grace. It is a transformation of character effected not by moral influences, but supernaturally by the Holy Spirit.

Faith does not grow in spite of suffering, but through suffering, when hope learns to contradict reality.

Our faith is not a matter of our hearing what Christ said long ago and “trying to carry it out. The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself....

Sanctification has a double aspect. Its positive side is vivification, the growing and maturing of the new man; its negative side is mortification, the weakening and killing of the old man.

Grace is not only needed for the occasion of conversion, the moment we suddenly (or slowly) come to our senses and realize that we are spiritually bankrupt, having nothing to bring to God and everythi...

All that we claim then in this life of sanctification is that by a step of faith we put ourselves into the hands of the Lord, for Him to work in us all the good pleasure of His will; and that by a con...

Sanctification is a process. Basically, the word sanctified means “set apart.” The term saint comes from the same root and means “a set-apart one” to the Lord. Another word with the same meaning is ho...

Conversion does not make us perfect, but it does catapult us into a total experience of discipleship that affects - and infects - every sphere of our living.

It takes a lifetime to fathom Jesus; it takes a lifetime to appropriate Jesus, it takes a lifetime to be clothed with Jesus. And the question comes to each of us, have we ‘put off the old man with his...

Sanctification is the work of the Holy Spirit in us whereby our inner being is progressively changed, freeing us more and more from sinful traits and developing within us over time the virtues of Chri...